Seminars

Instructions

1. Check the internal calendar for a free seminar slot.
2. Make a note on this page in the Tentative Speakers section that you are going to invite a speaker. Please include your name and email as host in case somebody wants to contact you.
3. Invite a speaker.
4. As soon as the speaker confirms, put the information in the Confirmed Speakers section.
5. Put the date into the internal calendar
6. Notify kilian [1] that we have a confirmed speaker so that I can update the web page. Please include title and abstract.
7. Notify Pachelle [2] about the seminar date.

--Kilian 21:48, 4 November 2005 (PST)

Tentative Speakers

May 9

• Speaker:
• Affiliation:
• Host:
• Title:
• Abstract:

Previous Seminars

Tuesday 22nd of November 2005

• Speaker: Scott Makeig
• Affiliation: Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Neural Computation, UCSD
• Title: Viewing event-related brain dynamics from the top down

Tuesday 29th of November 2005

• Speaker: Stanley Klein
• Affiliation: School of Optometry, UC Berkeley
• Title: Limits of Vision and psychophysical methods

Tuesday 6th of December 2005

• Speaker: Special debate between Walter J. Freeman and Robert Hecht-Nielsen
• Affiliation: University of California at Berkeley (Walter). University of California at San Diego (Robert)
• Title: Waves or words in neocortex

January 3

• Speaker: Dan Butts
• Affiliation: Harvard University
• Host: Thomas
• Title: "Temporal hyperacuity": visual neuron function at millisecond time resolution

January 17

• Speaker: Erhardt Barth
• Affiliation: Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatics, Luebeck, Germany
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Guiding eye movements for better communication

January 23 (Monday)

• Speaker: Read Montague
• Affiliation: Baylor College of Medicine
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Abstract plans and reward signals in a multi-round trust game

Confirmed Speakers

February 7

• Speaker: Christian Wehrhahn
• Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany
• Host: Tony
• Title: Seeing blindsight: motion at isoluminance?
• Abstract: TBA
• Host:

February 14

• Speaker: Jack Cowan
• Affiliation: U Chicago
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Spontaneous pattern formation in large scale brain activity: what visual migraines and hallucinations tell us about the brain
• Abstract: In 1952 Turing's paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis initiated an important approach to the mathematical analysis of spontaneous pattern formation. In 1973 Wilson and Cowan introduced a similar formulation in nets of interacting neurons and in 1979 Ermentrout and Cowan developed the mathematical analysis of such nets using local bifurcation theory and symmetry groups. Bressloff, Cowan, Golubitsky, Thomas and Wiener further developed this approach to characterize and analyze some of the circuitry of the primate visual cortex. The symmetry group used was the Euclidean group in the plane, E(2), under a novel rotation action. Such an action is related to the fact that the visual cortex is a network of oriented edge detectors. However it is clear that much more than the orientation of a local edge is detected in the visual cortex: movement, texture and surface information, color and depth, for example. In this talk I will describe a new approach that allows the incorporation of some of the above features into a comprehensive account of the origins of visual migraines and hallucinations.

February 21

• Speaker: Gerard Rinkus
• Affiliation: Brandeis University
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Hierarchical Sparse Distributed Representations of Sequence Recall and Recognition
• Abstract: TBA

February 28

• Speaker: Dario Ringach
• Affiliation: UCLA
• Host: thomas
• Title: TBA
• Abstract: TBA

March 7

• Speaker: Michael Wu
• Affiliation: Gallant lab/UC Berkeley
• Host: Bruno
• Title: TBA
• Abstract: TBA

March 14

• Speaker: Mate Lengyel
• Affiliation: Gatsby Unit/UCL London
• Host: fritz
• Title: Spike timing-based autoassociative memories
• Abstract: TBA

March 21

• Speaker: Mark Schnitzer
• Affiliation: Stanford University
• Host: Amir
• Title: TBA
• Abstract: TBA

April 4

• Speaker: Odelia Schwartz
• Affiliation: The Salk Institute
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Natural images and cortical representation
• Abstract:

April 11

• Speaker: Charles Anderson
• Affiliation: Washington University School of Medicine
• Host: Bruno
• Title: Population Coding in V1
• Abstract:

April 18

• Speaker: Risto Miikkulainen
• Affiliation: The University of Texas at Austin
• Host: Bruno
• Title: COMPUTATIONAL MAPS IN THE VISUAL CORTEX
• Abstract: How can a system as complex as the human visual system be constructed?

How can it be specified genetically, still allowing it to adapt to the environment? How can it perform complicated functions such as recognizing faces and identifying coherent objects immediately and automatically? While these questions have been open for quite some time, and much experimental work remains to be done to answer them conclusively, computational models have recently become powerful enough to suggests specific, computational answers: The cortical structures are constructed through input-driven self-organization, the self-organization is driven both by external visual inputs and by genetically determined internal inputs, and perceptual grouping takes place automatically through synchronization of neuronal activity, mediated by self-organized lateral connections. In this talk, I will describe a unified computational map model, LISSOM, built on these principles. Simulated experiments with LISSOM demonstrate how a wide variety of phenomena follow from them, including columnar map organization and patchy connectivity, recovery from retinal and cortical injury, psychophysical phenomena such as tilt aftereffects and contour integration, and newborn preference for faces. The model is used to gain a precise computational understanding of existing data, and to make specific predictions for future experimental and theoretical research.

April 25

• Speaker: Tim Lewis
• Affiliation: UC Davis
• Host: Thomas
• Title: tba
• Abstract:

May 2

• Speaker: Dileep George
• Affiliation: Numenta
• Host: Bruno
• Title: TBA
• Abstract: